Thursday, 14 January 2010

Weather Whoopee.

Well, on Tuesday I got what I wanted. Weather.The weatherman on the Today programme that morning forecast that a warm front was going to collide with a cold front, more or less on top of St Agnes. He was wrong. I was there. What happened was that a wet front hooked up with a windy front, and together they started making weather whoopee. With the rain coming at me more or less horizontally, I enjoyed an eighteen mile round trip to Porth-somewhere or other. Everywhere here is Porth-something, and the rain made it hard to read the 'Welcome to... Please drive carefully' sign outside the village.Thanks to the rain, I also made a great discovery. If you put your gaiters (yes, them again) on the right way round, and hook them over your laces, then your feet will stay nice and dry, even in the foulest weather. If you're not bright enough to figure that out for yourself, and put them on back to front, then instead they channel the water more or less straight into your footware, and you will be unhappy. We won't talk about gaiters anymore.Today and tomorrow I'm walking with my full pack, so it's slightly slower going than before, but not as slow as it was when Susie was here at the weekend. She has developed a deeply odd obsession with the memorial dedications on benches, and there are a lot of benches in Cornwall. Of course, before too long this led to her reflecting on her other favourite obsession - my mortality. She wanted to know where I'd like a bench placed in memory of me, as and when, of course... any suggestions?And lastly, my big toenails are preparing to say farewell to my big toes, again. When I first walked the West Highland Way, I managed to bash my big toes up quite a bit on the leg from Balmaha to The Drovers Inn, and the toenails have never quite recovered from the shock of being so violently uprooted: every now and then they start to change a rather pleasant plum colour, before going on to toenail glory - it doesn't feel very pleasant though. There's a lot of 'up and downage' on the coastal path, and with each step down, as my foot moves forward marginally in my boot, my bruised toes complain.Better let them start complaining again - fifteen miles today, twenty miles tomorrow, and back to London on Saturday, but I won't be walking that bit.